Unit 6 Serializability

Chapter 15: Transactions
Database System Concepts, 5th Ed.

©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
See www.db-book.com for conditions on re-use
Chapter 15: Transactions
 Transaction Concept
 Transaction State
 Concurrent Executions
 Serializability
 Recoverability
 Implementation of Isolation
 Transaction Definition in SQL
 Testing for Serializability.
Database System Concepts - 5th Edition, Sep 12, 2006. 15.2 ©Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan
Transaction Concept
 A transaction is a unit of program execution that accesses and
possibly updates various data items.
 E.g. transaction to transfer $50 from account A to account B:
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
 Two main issues to deal with:
 Failures of various kinds, such as hardware failures and system
crashes
 Concurrent execution of multiple transactions
Example of Fund Transfer
 Transaction to transfer $50 from account A to account B:
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
 Atomicity requirement
 if the transaction fails after step 3 and before step 6, money will be “lost”
leading to an inconsistent database state
 Failure could be due to software or hardware
 the system should ensure that updates of a partially executed transaction
are not reflected in the database
 Durability requirement — once the user has been notified that the transaction
has completed (i.e., the transfer of the $50 has taken place), the updates to the
database by the transaction must persist even if there are software or
hardware failures.
Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.)
 Transaction to transfer $50 from account A to account B:
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B)
 Consistency requirement in above example:
 the sum of A and B is unchanged by the execution of the transaction
 In general, consistency requirements include
 Explicitly specified integrity constraints such as primary keys and foreign
keys
 Implicit integrity constraints
– e.g. sum of balances of all accounts, minus sum of loan amounts

must equal value of cash-in-hand
 A transaction must see a consistent database.
 During transaction execution the database may be temporarily inconsistent.
 When the transaction completes successfully the database must be
consistent
 Erroneous transaction logic can lead to inconsistency
Example of Fund Transfer (Cont.)
 Isolation requirement — if between steps 3 and 6, another
transaction T2 is allowed to access the partially updated database, it
will see an inconsistent database (the sum A + B will be less than it
should be).
T1 T2
1. read(A)
2. A := A – 50
3. write(A)
read(A), read(B), print(A+B)
4. read(B)
5. B := B + 50
6. write(B
 Isolation can be ensured trivially by running transactions serially
 that is, one after the other.
 However, executing multiple transactions concurrently has significant
benefits, as we will see later.
ACID Properties
A transaction is a unit of program execution that accesses and possibly
updates various data items.To preserve the integrity of data the database
system must ensure:
 Atomicity. Either all operations of the transaction are properly reflected
in the database or none are.
 Consistency. Execution of a transaction in isolation preserves the
consistency of the database.
 Isolation. Although multiple transactions may execute concurrently,
each transaction must be unaware of other concurrently executing
transactions. Intermediate transaction results must be hidden from other
concurrently executed transactions.
 That is, for every pair of transactions Ti and Tj, it appears to Ti that
either Tj, finished execution before Ti started, or Tj started execution
after Ti finished.
 Durability. After a transaction completes successfully, the changes it
has made to the database persist, even if there are system failures.
Transaction State
 Active – the initial state; the transaction stays in this state while it is
executing
 Partially committed – after the final statement has been executed.
 Failed -- after the discovery that normal execution can no longer
proceed.
 Aborted – after the transaction has been rolled back and the
database restored to its state prior to the start of the transaction.
Two options after it has been aborted:
 restart the transaction
 can be done only if no internal logical error
 kill the transaction
 Committed – after successful completion.
Transaction State (Cont.)
Implementation of Atomicity and
Durability
 The recovery-management component of a database system
implements the support for atomicity and durability.
 E.g. the shadow-database scheme:
 all updates are made on a shadow copy of the database
 db_pointer is made to point to the updated shadow copy after
– the transaction reaches partial commit and
– all updated pages have been flushed to disk.
Implementation of Atomicity and Durability
(Cont.)
 db_pointer always points to the current consistent copy of the database.

 In case transaction fails, old consistent copy pointed to by db_pointer
can be used, and the shadow copy can be deleted.
 The shadow-database scheme:
 Assumes that only one transaction is active at a time.
 Assumes disks do not fail
 Useful for text editors, but
 extremely inefficient for large databases (why?)
– Variant called shadow paging reduces copying of data, but is
still not practical for large databases
 Does not handle concurrent transactions
 Will study better schemes in Chapter 17.
Concurrent Executions
 Multiple transactions are allowed to run concurrently in the system.
Advantages are:
 increased processor and disk utilization, leading to better
transaction throughput
 E.g. one transaction can be using the CPU while another is
reading from or writing to the disk
 reduced average response time for transactions: short
transactions need not wait behind long ones.
 Concurrency control schemes – mechanisms to achieve isolation
 that is, to control the interaction among the concurrent
transactions in order to prevent them from destroying the
consistency of the database
 Will study in Chapter 16, after studying notion of correctness
of concurrent executions.
Schedules
 Schedule – a sequences of instructions that specify the chronological
order in which instructions of concurrent transactions are executed
 a schedule for a set of transactions must consist of all instructions
of those transactions
 must preserve the order in which the instructions appear in each
individual transaction.
 A transaction that successfully completes its execution will have a
commit instructions as the last statement
 by default transaction assumed to execute commit instruction as its
last step
 A transaction that fails to successfully complete its execution will have
an abort instruction as the last statement
Schedule 1
 Let T1 transfer $50 from A to B, and T2 transfer 10% of the
balance from A to B.
 A serial schedule in which T1 is followed by T2 :
Schedule 2
• A serial schedule where T2 is followed by T1
Schedule 3
 Let T1 and T2 be the transactions defined previously. The following
schedule is not a serial schedule, but it is equivalent to Schedule 1.
In Schedules 1, 2 and 3, the sum A + B is preserved.
Schedule 4
 The following concurrent schedule does not preserve the
value of (A + B ).
Serializability
 Basic Assumption – Each transaction preserves database
consistency.
 Thus serial execution of a set of transactions preserves database
consistency.
 A (possibly concurrent) schedule is serializable if it is equivalent to a
serial schedule. Different forms of schedule equivalence give rise to
the notions of:
1. conflict serializability
2. view serializability
 Simplified view of transactions
 We ignore operations other than read and write instructions
 We assume that transactions may perform arbitrary computations
on data in local buffers in between reads and writes.
 Our simplified schedules consist of only read and write
instructions.
Conflicting Instructions
 Instructions li and lj of transactions Ti and Tj respectively, conflict if
and only if there exists some item Q accessed by both li and lj, and at
least one of these instructions wrote Q.
1. li = read(Q), lj = read(Q). li and lj don’t conflict.
2. li = read(Q), lj = write(Q). They conflict.
3. li = write(Q), lj = read(Q). They conflict
4. li = write(Q), lj = write(Q). They conflict
 Intuitively, a conflict between li and lj forces a (logical) temporal order
between them.
 If li and lj are consecutive in a schedule and they do not conflict,
their results would remain the same even if they had been
interchanged in the schedule.
Conflict Serializability
 If a schedule S can be transformed into a schedule S´ by a series of
swaps of non-conflicting instructions, we say that S and S´ are
conflict equivalent.
 We say that a schedule S is conflict serializable if it is conflict
equivalent to a serial schedule
Conflict Serializability (Cont.)
 Schedule 3 can be transformed into Schedule 6, a serial
schedule where T2 follows T1, by series of swaps of non-
conflicting instructions.
 Therefore Schedule 3 is conflict serializable.
Schedule 3 Schedule 6
Conflict Serializability (Cont.)
 Example of a schedule that is not conflict serializable:
 We are unable to swap instructions in the above schedule to obtain

either the serial schedule < T3, T4 >, or the serial schedule < T4, T3 >.
View Serializability
 Let S and S´ be two schedules with the same set of transactions. S
and S´ are view equivalent if the following three conditions are met,
for each data item Q,
1. If in schedule S, transaction Ti reads the initial value of Q, then in
schedule S’ also transaction Ti must read the initial value of Q.
2. If in schedule S transaction Ti executes read(Q), and that value
was produced by transaction Tj (if any), then in schedule S’ also
transaction Ti must read the value of Q that was produced by the
same write(Q) operation of transaction Tj .
3. The transaction (if any) that performs the final write(Q) operation
in schedule S must also perform the final write(Q) operation in
schedule S’.
As can be seen, view equivalence is also based purely on reads and
writes alone.
View Serializability (Cont.)
 A schedule S is view serializable if it is view equivalent to a serial
schedule.
 Every conflict serializable schedule is also view serializable.
 Below is a schedule which is view-serializable but not conflict
serializable.
 What serial schedule is above equivalent to?

 Every view serializable schedule that is not conflict serializable has
blind writes.

Unit 6 Serializability

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Unit 6 Serializability

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Chapter 15: Transactions

Database System Concepts, 5th Ed.

– e.g. sum of balances of all accounts, minus sum of loan amounts

 db_pointer always points to the current consistent copy of the database.

In Schedules 1, 2 and 3, the sum A + B is preserved.

 Example of a schedule that is not conflict serializable:

 We are unable to swap instructions in the above schedule to obtain

 What serial schedule is above equivalent to?

You might also like